You’re on your own, and you know what you know. And you will be the guy who’ll decide where you’ll go. Oh the places you‘ll go. … Dr. Seuss from ‘Oh, The Places You’ll Go..’

If you are a reader of my blog or new to Build a Solo Practice @ SPU, you have learned or will learn I’m a firm believer in choices, personal responsibility and a ‘no victim’ mentality.  That’s not to say in life those who are personally responsible can’t feel or be victimized. But life is what you do with the cards you are dealt (or deal yourself) and it all turns on the choices you make with the options in hand.

Failure isn’t due to lack of resources, it’s due to lack of resourcefulness. - Anthony Robbins

If you are on the verge of going solo or in the process of making this decision and weighing your options, there are a few exercises  you need to sweat through.  And you need to give serious consideration to the results:

1. Paint Your Future

If what you are doing is not moving you towards your goals, then it’s moving you away from your goals. – Brian Tracy

Where do you see yourself five, ten, fifteen years down the road?  What will you have placed in your life? What will you have removed?  What is satisfying?  Not just professionally but personally.  When you are a solo, especially,  your professional and personal lives are intimately entwined. Any friction between the two will create a disruptive tension and either your personal life will suffer, your work life will suffer or most likely both. Worse, your health will deteriorate. Is doing what you are doing now going to move you further towards or away from your vision?

2. How Hard Are You Willing to Work?

The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary. – Vidal Sassoon

There is no substitute for hard work and discipline.  You can work smarter. Take full advantage of technologies. Get additional support.  But there is no outsourcing of the mental muscle and sweat equity when your name is attached to…your life! Anyone who tells you otherwise has an agenda which is counter to your real best interests.  If your goal is to build a solo practice, to utilize your law license, to service clients and create a way of working and living that satisfies the painting you’ve just painted of your future, you must be fully invested in it.

3. Keep Inspired

Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it. – Maya Angelou

It is hard to wake up every day fully engaged and enthused about what you are doing.  It is truly the rare person or ‘self-actualized’ person who is.  But this is a goal unto itself.  And if you have more days excited and motivated by your decision to be doing what you are doing – operating a solo practice – then you’ve made the right choice.  If it’s the opposite, you have more decisions to make to help you realize #1.  A lawyer functioning as a lawyer, whether solo or in Big Law, who dreads waking up in the morning serves no one, not her client and certainly not herself or her family.  Monitor your inspiration.  If it’s waning, figure out why fast.  True entrepreneurial lawyers will figure out what they need to do to increase those days they are glad to be doing what they are doing – running a solo practice and servicing clients on their terms.

4. Be the Turtle, Not the Hare

Our business in life is not to get ahead of others, but to get ahead of ourselves. - E. Joseph Cossman

There is a chronic, pervasive and unhealthy habit we are all guilty of at one time or another and that is comparing ourselves to everyone around us.  If we’re a certain age or a certain intelligence or a certain sex or a certain ethnicity or come from a certain background or have a certain education or certain skill set everyone has advice about how we are supposed to be performing and doing and at what level and pace.  Others measure us against these markers and we measure ourselves against these markers and most often do so to our detriment. Only you will know if solo practice is right for you.  Only you will know when the time is right to jump in to solo practice…or  jump out.    Only you will know. And when you decide where you are going, travel at your own pace surrounded by those who support your decision. Follow the path that is in alignment with the goals you’ve laid out in #1

Every choice has an end result. - Zig Ziglar

What end result do you want to achieve? Once you’ve done these exercises, committed them to paper, you have a starting point. So, get started!

On that note, I will be taking a blogging break as I continue to pour my energies and enthusiasm in to Solo Practice University.

If you would like a confidence booster and you haven’t listened to Going Solo in a New Economy or received the free 51 page e-book filled with stories from others who have gone solo and you would like to,  click here. If you’ve already listened to it and think a friend might benefit, pay it forward and send them this blog post and link.

Be back soon. Stay cool!